Chronic pain sufferers deserve community's compassion as well as addicts

Huge thanks for covering our recent “Don’t Punish Pain” rally. It’s time legitimate chronic-pain patients have a place in media coverage and policy-making – both of which have focused almost exclusively on abusers of medications that simply afford us reasonable functionality, and humane relief from intractable agonies caused by illness or injury.

Addicts and abusers – who seem to have cornered the market on government officials’ compassion – take such drugs to disengage from reality.

We take our medicine to engage in life: with our families, homes, communities, churches, and more. Now is the time to turn a tide of misinformation, hysteria, and outright lies.

No one in the pain community says that addiction and overdoses are not tragedies to be addressed. However, anti-opioid crusaders are forcing the medical abandonment of legions of honest, innocent, suffering patients.

Our suicide rates are skyrocketing. Not because we can’t take drug withdrawal, but because many choose death over horrendous, unrelenting, forcibly untreated physical pain. Aren’t these tragedies as well?

We know so. We hope that the public, as well as our elected officials and their task forces, will soon agree.